indias cricketers should not have to choose the ipl over voting

In the run-up to yesterday's polling day, there was a large billboard on Peddar road in the heart of South Mumbai that asked where Sachin Tendulkar would be on 24 April: the UAE or Mumbai. Tendulkar, it turned out, flew in to Mumbai to cast his vote, on his birthday no less. However, the question nobody was asking was what about all the other Indian cricketers who are part of the IPL? The first 20 matches of the India’s richest and glitziest sports league were shifted to the UAE because the Indian government could not guarantee security for matches during the 2014 Lok Sabha elections. The BCCI has moved the tournament before during a national election, with then IPL chairman Lalit Modi taking it to South Africa in 2009.

Unfortunately, this has the unintended consequence of essentially disenfranchising every single Indian player who is part of the IPL. Jharkhand went to the polls yesterday too but there were no smiling photos of India captain MS Dhoni holding up an inked finger in Ranchi. Instead, he was with the Chennai Super Kings getting ready for their match against Mumbai Indians in Dubai today. Rohit Sharma, the captain of Mumbai Indians, was similarly unable to make the trip to his home city Mumbai, unlike his predecessor Tendulkar, who is now retired. To be sure, part of the blame belongs with the system. There is no way to vote using an absentee ballot, as one can do in the United States. Commentator Harsha Bhogle tweeted out his frustration and desire to vote, and how he was unable to do so because he was with the IPL’s travelling circus. 

The BCCI is also constrained by having to play the IPL in May and June because this is the only window in the global cricket calendar big enough to accommodate it. It would be almost impossible to hold a tournament of this magnitude at any other time of the year. Yet the system should not give the board the license to shrug its shoulders and do nothing. Especially when a solution is not hard to find. There are a grand total of seven voting days before the IPL comes home in May. It does not seem to be asking too much of the world’s richest cricket body – one which is set to get even richer, as its currently suspended president pointed out to the Supreme Court – to accommodate those dates and allow players to fly home to vote. Yes, it would mean more matches at 4 pm, which means lower TV ratings, but that is an insignificant price to pay when the payoff is participation in the world’s largest democratic exercise.


Given the hammering the board has received in recent times, offering to fund the players who wanted to vote would have garnered it some much needed positive publicity. It would have showed the board at least appears to care about events and interests beyond its own bottom line and is willing to consider interests beyond its own bottom line (although this is probably expecting too much of a board that wanted to appoint an employee - Ravi Shastri - to a panel that would investigate his employer - BCCI president N Srinivasan). The franchises must shoulder some of the responsibility here too. A recent study showed the combined wealth of all IPL owners to be in excess of $25 billion. Admittedly Mukesh Ambani does skew the figures, but the poorest was Preity Zinta, who is worth just $30 million. That is still more than enough to spring for return air-fare from Dubai for a few dozen players each.


This year Bollywood did not escape scrutiny because the International Indian Film Academy Awards were being held in Florida from 23 April to 26 April. Yet the IPL and the BCCI have largely gotten a free pass. India’s cricketers, especially those who are part of the Indian team, tend to be youth icons. Their behaviour influences the behaviour of their young fans. Yet instead of collage of photos of Dhoni and company showing their inked fingers on social media, we get innumerable renditions of Bulaava Aiya Hai. The BCCI and the IPL franchises ought to recognise that the players are citizens first and put an end to this state of affairs where the lust for money results in our cricketer’s being deprived of their most fundamental right every five years.